Alberta is in a special hell all its own. The price for Western Canadian heavy oil has fallen at times to $3 a barrel. And it might drop even lower.

“There is a very real possibility that, as global inventories overflow, our energy will hit negative prices,” said a sombre Premier Jason Kenney in an televised address to Albertans Tuesday evening.

“We will be paying people to take away our resources.”

Yes, “negative price” is a thing. Heavy oil can be so worthless that you have to pay shippers to take the stuff off your hands.

Kenney’s whole speech was much like this: a relentless drumbeat of news that alternated between bleak and bad.

“Alberta’s budget deficit this year may triple from $7 billion to almost $20 billion,” said Kenney. “We will face a great fiscal reckoning in the future.”

That reckoning will be made worse by the fact that while other parts of the country recover after the pandemic, Alberta will continue to struggle.

“The end of the pandemic will not be the end of the economic downturn, the likes of which we have not seen since the 1930s,” said Kenney. “The crash in energy prices means that Alberta’s downturn will be deeper, and our recovery slower.”

At the nadir of the economic downturn, Kenney expects one in four working Albertans to be unemployed: “Based on some polling that we’ve done and some analysis, I fully expect unemployment in Alberta to be at least 25 per cent, at least half a million unemployed Albertans.”

That quote didn’t come from Kenney Tuesday evening but from comments he made to an online energy conference Tuesday morning. Kenney didn’t mention the projected unemployment rate in his televised speech perhaps because he felt it was already gloomy enough.

The one bright-ish bit of news from Kenney was that he thinks the province’s health care system will be able to handle the pandemic.

He presented various scenarios of how the health emergency will hit the province. The most “probable” expects 800,000 Albertans will be infected by the end of summer with between 400 and 3,100 dying. The “elevated” scenario has about one million infected and between 500 and 6,600 deaths.

Those numbers sent a shock wave through Alberta with people wondering how the province could eventually have 800,000 (or more) infected when the total number worldwide is, at this point, about 1.5 million.

A technical briefing for journalists by health experts on Wednesday explained the worldwide number is confirmed cases, many of them hospitalized. It’s a number that will get much higher over the summer as the number of infections grows exponentially around the world.

The projected number of infected for Alberta, on the other hand, includes everybody who becomes infected, not just those who test positive for the disease. It also includes those who will be infected but not exhibit any symptoms.

“The evidence clearly shows that at least 80% of those who contract COVID-19 experience mild symptoms,” said Tom McMillan, a spokesman for Alberta Health. “Under the ‘probable’ model, a maximum of 50,000 individuals would seek medical care — which would include everything from a brief visit to hospital to a multi-day stay.”

That’s a quote Kenney might have wanted to add to his speech to avoid people panicking a little listening to him Tuesday night.

However, his sobering speech did serve several purposes, though.

It was a necessary punch to the gut to those who refuse to take the pandemic seriously and agitate for a relaxation of the pandemic crackdown.

“We simply cannot risk letting the virus loose in Alberta,” said Kenney. “That would create a public health catastrophe, which would force an even more stringent lockdown in the future, leaving our economy even further battered.”

The dismal nature of the speech also served a political purpose.

It helps make the case for more fiscal help from Ottawa.

It also helps soften up Albertans to the province’s new economic reality. Kenney is a staunch free-enterprise conservative who won the provincial election a year ago promising to, among other things, create jobs, improve the economy and balance the budget.

Now, the province is headed toward 25 per cent unemployment, a massive recession, and a $20 billion deficit. What Kenney wants to make clear to Albertans is that none of this is his fault. Blame COVID-19 for the pandemic. Blame the Russians and Saudia Arabia for forcing down the price of oil. Blame them all for the global recession.

But the NDP opposition is blaming Kenney for using the public health emergency as cover to ram through controversial legislation, including the province’s six-week old budget that is already woefully out of date.

And Kenney might yet find grief from his government’s decision to invest $1.5 billion of public money into the Keystone XL pipeline this year — and follow up with $6 billion loan guarantees next year.

Kenney says the investment will create pipeline-laying jobs immediately and help the province’s economy in the future. Yes, but it’s not exactly diversifying Alberta’s energy-dependent economy. And skeptics can’t help but point out the province will be investing as much as $7.5 billion in a pipeline to transport a product that has a price so volatile that sometimes we have to pay people to take it off our hands.

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